JanRain as recently launched Pibb.com, a quasi irc chat, instant messenger, and forum all rolled together on a website. The interesting aspect is that it’s only accessible via OpenID. They have widgets for IRC, WordPress, Facebook, and regular websites in an attempt to make Pibb pervasive enough to be interesting. One of the things that I really like about it is that the conversation takes place IRC-style but has persistent channel logs and searching built in (no IRC bot needed to log the channel). However, forums users will like it too because each channel can have a many individual threads. Pibb is still under development but the basic features can be found in the Pibb manual.

[...] Check it out! While looking through the blogosphere we stumbled on an interesting post today.Here’s a quick excerpt JanRain as recently launched Pibb.com, a quasi irc chat, instant messenger, and forum all rolled together on a website. The interesting aspect is that it’s only accessible via OpenID. They have widgets for IRC, Wordpress, Facebook, and regular websites in an attempt to make Pibb pervasive enough to be interesting. One of the things that I really like about it is that the conversation takes place IRC-style but has persistent channel logs and searching built in (no IRC bot needed to log the chann [...]